Patricia Bizzell's "How Composition Saved the World"
Rebekah Shultz Colby

With a bold title for his new book, Stanley Fish has declared that academics should save the world on their own time and not attempt it in the classroom. In an effort made possibly to preserve academic freedom, Fish has argued that the business of academia is solely teaching the content of the disciplines without this teaching being influenced by personal ideological beliefs or efforts to achieve social justice. With our concerns aimed at better teaching and thus empowering the educationally underprepared and socially marginalized as well as teaching students to rhetorically critique political rhetoric and engage in their own political debate so that they become better civic citizens, Fish seems to think that composition has got it all wrong.

In her talk entitled How Composition Saved the World, titled to directly and unapologetically take Fish head on, Patricia Bizzell stated that Fishs latest critique of composition is nothing new. Maxine Hairston accused James Berlin of nothing less when she admonished him to just teach writing without all the cultural critique. And indeed, as Bizzell admitted, saving the world is never anyones job. However, as teachers of writing, the gatekeepers of academic literacy for students, saving the world is also an activity we cannot in good conscience desist from. In fact, it is this concern for educational social justice that drove writing instruction to become what it is today in the first place.

In the 70s and 80s, classroom demographics changed dramatically. With the advent of the GI Bill, open admissions, and the opening of new universities that were purposefully priced to be affordable to the community in places like California, students from lower-economic backgrounds and more diverse cultural backgrounds, not to mention many more women, were attending college for the first time. Some viewed the strange errors that these new arrivals made in their writing as evidence that they were cognitively deficient in some way -- cognitively arrested or even retarded. In fact, some even argued that Black English led to these cognitive deficiencies. However, Mina Shaughnessy, struggling to more effectively teach writing to first-generation college students at City University of New York, brought new critical reading strategies to bear on student writing, actually spending time analyzing the patterns of error in student writing. This led to a much more productive line of thought in composition -- students were not cognitively delayed but were just beginners in academic discourse. This new theory that students learn academic writing by being enculturated into academic discourse was developed more fully by Mike Rose, Kenneth Bruffee, and David Bartholomae just to name a few. And along with many others, their writing and teaching made the world a better place for classrooms. Ironically, these writing teacher-scholars were influenced in large part by Stanley Fish. For instance, Fish himself argued in Is there a Text in This Class? that meaning in language is culturally and socially constructed.

However, after this movement, others such as Keith Gilyard, Geoffrey Sirc, Victor Villanueva, Deborah Brandt, and many, many others argued that in solely teaching academic discourse, writing teachers were trying to change students into clones of neutered, neutral academic discourse instead of working with the cultural, linguistic ,and rhetorical resources students already possess. Perhaps these discourses were nontraditional, but students could achieve more rhetorical and academic success if they could also utilize and draw from their own discourse, changing academic discourse in more socially relevant ways in the meantime.

Unfortunately, in what seems to be a contradiction of his earlier work, Fish seems to be arguing that disciplinary knowledge is objective and unchanging. While in his book he contextualizes his definition of truth by saying that disciplinary truth is an historically and disciplinarily agreed-upon truth, Bizzell contended that the act of agreeing upon knowledge is messy, not usually simply agreed upon by everyone, and always already affected by the political and cultural system of academe an error she termed the error of network. In making this argument, Fish also seems to be arguing that our job as teachers should be to simply and unproblematically transmit this transparent and objective disciplinary truth to our students who are waiting like acultural vessels to be filled up -- an error Bizzell coined the unavailability of purity. Furthermore, Bizzell argued that if we are seriously engaged in the pursuit of truth, as teachers we need to bring up differences in political views and how these differing views would affect the meaning and construction of this truth. Political difference has brought tremendous growth to knowledge-making in the disciplines. For instance, in the field of rhetoric and composition alone, where would our understanding of feminine rhetorics be without the politics of the womens movement or the political F word for so many conservatives -- feminism? Where would our understanding of African American rhetorics be without the hotly contested Civil Rights Movement? Whether Fish wants to admit it or not, politics shape knowledge construction. So by teaching this knowledge, this truth, we inherently communicate our politics to our students even if we never overtly state our political beliefs in the classroom.

Bizzell also brought up ways that teachers implicitly communicate their political views in the classroom. In teaching, we inherently communicate our whole personality. Students come into contact with a whole person -- not someone who can neatly compartmentalize and seal off part of him or herself. In turn, the act of teaching is coming in full contact with a room full of students who also cannot help but fully communicate who they are as individuals as well. This communication comes through with tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, and the word choice used in the syllabus, as well as through what is overtly spoken or remains unspoken. However, while we cannot always choose the students whom we teach, students often can choose their teachers. They usually choose a particular teacher because of other implicit things that a teacher may teach -- things that come from a teachers full personality that a teacher may or may not be aware of. For instance, Bizzell was proud of the fact that struggling writers at College of the Holy Cross usually seek her out to teach them writing. Although Holy Cross does not officially offer developmental writing classes, Bizzell feels that as a result of student selection, she is offering an informal developmental writing course.

Along with these logical problems with Fishs argument, Bizzell also pointed out ethical objections to it. In the objection of unworthiness, she argued that it would be a dereliction of our social duty as teachers not to try to empower students to change their lives through increased political awareness through course content. However, in teaching this political awareness, Bizzell encourages teachers to expose students to a myriad of conflicting political beliefs that may conflict with each other in uncomfortable ways. For instance, in her first-year writing reader, she brought in a range of readings about the history of the Civil Rights Movement and racial injustice, even including writing from a rhetorically gifted writer who was stridently against abolition even though she found his views to be personally abhorrent. Finally, she brought up the objection of impossibility -- even if teachers are able to divorce themselves from teaching material that is always already inherently political, it is not the material that is political but what is done with it that makes it political. And as teachers, it is our moral and social responsibility to try to influence our students to bring about social justice in the professional and social spheres they will encounter after graduation.

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